produced two OUR MUSIC events at which Indigenous and non- Indigenous music students performed with the Stuart & Sons piano. Manuscripts and links to the recordings of these events are also presented in chapter six.

The Modern Piano

The modern piano design is defined by the culmination of technological design advancements since its inception in 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori. The principles of Cristofori’s responsive piano key action¹⁰ are still applied in the modern piano today.¹¹ Essentially the modern piano has an 88 key compass, is cross –strung with high tensioned steel strings, and importantly to this research the strings are coupled to the bridge and soundboard by pinning the strings in a horizontal plane, with an applied down-bearing force through the bridge to the crowned soundboard.The modern piano design has been universally deployed in most piano design throughout the late 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Since approximately the 1880s, this standardized piano design is generally referred to as the modern piano in piano literature.

In the sixty or so years before the modern piano design was standardised, the fundamental changes from ‘wood based’ to ‘iron based’ pianoswere led by the technological advancements in steel wire manufacture.Piano strings made of finely drawn high tensile steel wire, stretched to high tensions in heavy iron frames were found to produce a superior piano tone. William Brockendon’s ¹² invention for drawing wire through holes in diamonds and rubies, in 1819,¹³ eventually established an efficient process for the production of hard drawn steel wire. Many of the innovative piano design developments in the 1800s were made possible by the advancements in steel wire manufacturing. Some examples of these are Alpheus Babcock’s one piece iron frame patented in 1825, Henri Pape’s expansion of the keyboard compass to 97 notes in 1842, and the successes of American piano manufacturers, Chickering and Steinway at the International world trade exhibitions of the 1850s with their iron framed grand pianos. It is widely recognised that the eventual standardisation of the modern piano sound was influenced by the desirable tonal improvements of the higher tensioned steel wire.The piano wire manufacturer Moritz Poehlmann of Nuremberg is accredited for improving steel tensile strength and wire hardness in the 1850s.

…all the leading piano manufacturers of Europe and
America adopted the Poehlmann make for their pianos.¹⁴

Between 1867 and 1893, music wire tensile strength increased by 44%. ¹⁵

¹⁰I was privilegedto play a remake of Cristofori’s piano in Rome in January 2015, at the Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti
Musicali di Roma è
^{11     3} Good, 37-38.
¹²the 19^th-century painter & inventor
¹³Samuel Wolfenden, A Treatise on the Art of Pianofarte Construction,(Old Unwin Brothers Limited ,1975), 6. also:⁴ Good,184.
¹⁴AlfredDolge, Pianos And Their Makers,(Dover, 1911), 124; see also
Joel & Priscilla Rappaport, “Strings/Stringing” inEncyclopedia of the Piano, ed.RobertPalmieri,383-385.(New York:
Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Volume 1131, 1996) , 384.
^{15     2}Wolfenden, Art of Pianofarte Construction, 7